«We need to think big to tackle climate change»

Published on 31/08/2020

A former US Navy Captain, who late during his career at the Pentagon in Washington once held a role equivalent to a two-star Navy admiral, James Goudreau is as passionate about the environment as any green activist. 

Yet, unlike others who take their mission to the streets and bombard their opponents with moral shaming, Goudreau, the Head of Climate at Novartis, has learned to listen and work on solutions that can convince people to embrace changes that help protect our environment.

Living with his family in Newburyport, Massachusetts, today, Goudreau was a member of the US Navy for more than 26 years. He worked both as a supply corps officer deployed on ships and in the field and then led the Navy Energy Coordination Office at the Pentagon, where he was responsible for hatching a strategy and implementing projects to help the Navy become greener, more sustainable and more resilient. 

“Towards the end of my career at the Navy, I was given a very unique opportunity to go to the Pentagon and work for the Chief of Naval Operations on his staff. In that role, I focused on operational energy issues related to both vulnerabilities and capabilities,” Goudreau said about his five-year stint in Washington. 

While his initial focus was strategic energy diversification in the supply chain, his perspective continuously broadened, since questions surrounding energy are intrinsically connected to other vital domains. “You can’t talk energy without talking water. And you can’t talk water without talking food. So that leads you to what’s known as the energy, food, water nexus. And any serious organization that looks at that recognizes that the climate impact on that energy, food, water nexus is significant,” Goudreau explained.

Looking at the size and quality of the challenge to change energy consumption of the Navy, Goudreau could have easily thrown in the towel. The US Navy has more than 300 000 personnel on active duty. It also has by far the largest fleet in the world with nearly 300 combat vessels and more than 3700 operational aircraft.

There are easier things to do than convince experienced combat-hardened Navy officers to think about or even embrace green energy. Challenging though it was, Goudreau remembers the five years at the Pentagon as a “fascinating time” because it allowed him to develop a more holistic way of tackling the challenges of climate change. 

After working on these issues specifically for the Navy, he was asked to stay in the Pentagon and serve as the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Energy). In this new role, he was asked to address these issues and more for all of the Navy and Marine Corps operational forces as well as installation commands. 

Working together with several think tanks in Washington, he started to develop new ways to make troops not only greener but more combat-ready. Among the many projects he developed was a flexible solar blanket for patrol troops, which would replace conventional batteries that could weigh up to 20 to 30 pounds. 

The trick to lift the project from idea to reality was to understand the needs of the troops on the ground. “If you tell a Marine to be more environmentally sustainable during combat, they generally don’t care about that. They care about coming home alive, because that’s their mission. But there are ways that you can say that the new approach is helping the Marine become more capable, more survivable, more successful. And it’s also better for the environment. That’s what they will embrace.”

The approach to put user needs at the center proved decisive to spur projects which otherwise would have never been possible to turn around – be it to install hybrid electric drives in destroyers or use renewable micro grids to power military bases. 

“Our ability to drive these projects was mainly due to the fact that we looked at the energy and climate change challenge from a holistic point of view and interpreted it as a systems issue with a lot of interdependencies,” Goudreau said. “We focused on climate change as a threat multiplier, what impact that had on the energy, food, water nexus and then tried to understand what the user needed.”

Goudreau is convinced that this is the way forward as the world has little time to tackle the consequences of climate change given the sharp rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has already surpassed levels deemed reversible.

“The reality is, 350 parts per million of CO₂ is the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s considered safe or livable,” Goudreau said. “We’re already over 418 parts per million as of May 2020, which means we far exceed what we should have. And that means that we have decades of change that are going to happen, just from the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere.”

Action is needed fast. “Responsible organizations have to continue to try to really aggressively reduce their carbon emissions and at the same time figure out how they’re going to live in this new reality.

Because if you don’t plan for that change, you’ll be caught in a very unpleasant way by that change at some point. Taking a longer horizon is vital.”

Mr. Goudreau, you joined Novartis in 2016 after more than 20 years with the US Navy. What triggered your decision to join a pharmaceuticals company?

There was both a personal and a professional aspect. On a personal level, my wife and I made a choice to move back to Massachusetts because our daughter was eight years old at the time and we wanted her to grow up in Massachusetts, close to family, schools and the environment where we grew up. At the same time, Novartis created a brand-new position, which fitted both my interest and my ability to tackle climate change initiatives from a systemic point of view.  

What attracted you most about the new position?

The new position was a result of a reorganization that allowed all the environment-related work Novartis had been doing over the last 15 to 20 years across divisional structures to be put for the first time under one central organization in Novartis Business Services. All the previous groundbreaking efforts, such as the establishment of an internal carbon price and the creation of carbon-sink projects, among many others, were pooled in one place to help Novartis achieve its goals, which is to become carbon-neutral in its own operations by 2025 and water and plastic-neutral by 2030. On top of that, the new position was also created to develop new solutions regarding climate adaptation strategies. 

Can you specify the concept of climate adaptation?

Besides pushing for greenhouse gas reductions through efficiency measures, we are now also increasing our efforts to understand physical and transition risks that are resulting from climate change. This was the kind of work I was centering on when at the Pentagon and which I felt drawn to in particular since the question is not when but how we will cope with the consequences of climate change. 

What does this mean for Novartis?

Since we are delivering medicines all over the world, we need to prepare ourselves to anticipate the impact of climate change in areas such as raw materials sourcing, supply chain and manufacturing resilience, among many other areas. Other questions that arise in this respect are how we will focus our R&D in the future. Even as the coronavirus crisis has deflected attention away from climate change risks, non-communicable diseases are set to rise due to climate change, leading to an increase in respiratory illnesses, heart diseases and diabetes, among others. The World Health Organization estimates that between 2030 and 2050 there will be an additional 250 000 deaths per year due to these changes and that the direct healthcare costs will be in the range of 2 to 4 billion US dollars per year.

In terms of carbon reduction, how far have you been able to make progress?

One of the first big moves after I joined Novartis was to work on a virtual power purchase agreement with Invenergy for 100 megawatts of wind power from their Santa Rita East wind farm in Texas. In the late summer of 2017, after working with the finance team, the procurement team and the treasury, we signed a contract which is now helping us decarbonize all of the electricity that we buy in the United States. And we’re going to keep doing that all over the world in markets where it is possible. Currently, we are advancing efforts to do a similar deal in Europe. We’re likewise looking into many other areas such as efficiency investments, procurement processes, packaging, logistics and transportation. 

Although the deal with Invenergy has been large, you did not make a huge publicity stunt out of it. What was the reason behind keeping quiet?

Several thoughts were behind the decision not to go aggressively public with the deal. While the deal was a substantial step in our efforts to become carbon-neutral in our operations, we were reluctant to make a big announcement back in 2017 as we had to first see whether the windfarm developers would reach financial closing. We didn’t want to overpromise, but simply wanted to wait and see how things would turn out and know for sure that they had stable financing for construction. By 2018, as we saw that we were moving in the right direction, we made a small announcement about the project but kept focused on making more progress. 

What else kept you from making a bigger splash?

We wanted to get another large deal in progress or completed before we started claiming success. This windfarm meant we had decarbonized all the electricity we buy in the United States, but there was (and is) still so much that remains to be done. Additionally, this was a technical deal involving a small team of highly specialized people. In and of itself, it was not a “sexy deal” connecting people emotionally to the fight against climate change. Many associates are interested in other projects that connect on a more emotional level. Nevertheless, I believe it was a crucial step in the right direction, as I am convinced that we can only make substantial advances if we make big, direction-changing deals.

Is this a general problem for the climate change movement? While the actual work to save the planet is very technical, people struggle to connect emotionally to the engineering work required to effect change. How do you tackle this paradox?

We need to find ways to create actions that resonate emotionally with people – be it associates or the public in general. We are doing this already with grassroots initiatives, such as the Green Team, which was created several years ago by a number of associates in Basel who are very passionate about climate change. Their initiatives not only helped change behavior here in Basel, making our cafeterias plastic-free, for example. They also ignited a global movement in which thousands of Novartis associates today are participating in meaningful environmental sustainability action at multiple sites. Simultaneously, I believe we need to push forward with large projects such as virtual power purchasing agreements that can really make a rapid difference, even if their nature seems slightly abstract.

What other elements are important to drive behavioral changes and embrace climate action?

Another important aspect in my view is that we find solutions which really can make a difference to users. As I learned in the Navy, it makes little sense to try and coerce someone to accept and embrace climate change or green energy. The best way to win someone over is to understand someone’s needs and work from this premise to find a solution that can help change the situation. 

So, no moral imperative?

There’s absolutely an imperative to change, and to change rapidly. For a very long period of time, I think one of the weaknesses across the environmental sustainability community has been a way of messaging that implies they know what the right thing is for the planet and, by extension, no one else does. This naturally triggers negative reactions and emotional criticism. What does resonate with most people, however, is if you take the time to engage in a conversation, a genuine conversation, where you listen as well as speak. You try to listen for what their challenges and problems are and take what you’re working on and translate it into their language and into their problems. Because if you can’t do that, why should they change what they’re doing just to help you accomplish your goal?

Is this the way forward? To get green activities more deeply ingrained in the company?

Absolutely. This is the right thing to do, and it’s common sense. For a long time, many people thought that you can be either profitable or sustainable. But not both. Our Texas windfarm deal, however, proved that both things are achievable at the same time. In order to bring about change, we need to engage with leadership, engage with stakeholders and also engage with the people who traditionally might not embrace sustainability because they see it as a profitability versus sustainability discussion. This also includes our suppliers, where we are putting greater efforts into bringing about change. Additionally, we need to take action because our investors and external stakeholders want to see that we are making progress. Health organizations, including groups such as Kaiser Permanente, aim to decarbonize their supply chain, our packaging and the way we work in our offices.